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8.Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Life
Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, grandson of the great biologist,
Thomas
Henry Huxley, who helped develop the theory of evolution. His mother was the
niece of Matthew Arnold, and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold. This family
heritage of intellectual elite surely would have great effect on his work
and life. Nevertheless, Huxley stood apart from the class in which he was
born. He believed that in pursuing individual freedom the least
class-instituted slavery imposed on people was wrong. He was educated at
Eton and Balliol College, Oxford and took his B.A. degree in English in
1916. He entered the literary world, when he was still Oxford, where he met
many famous writers and became close friends with D. H. Lawrence. Then he
became a journalist and worked as a full-time writer in 1923. He traveled a
lot around the world and ever lived in different countries. In 1937 he
settled in U.S.A. and remained for most of his life in California. He died
on November 22, 1963. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his
parents' grave in England.
Huxley wrote in a wide range but mainly rested his
reputation on his early social satires. His novels could be divided into
three groups. Chrome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and
Point Counter Point (1928) fell into first group, social satires dealing
with foibles of contemporary society. Brave New World (1932) belonged
to the second, which dealt with the possible horrifying future society.
Eyeless in Gaza (1936) was the most important in the third group that
turned to religious support. The novel is a turning point in Huxley’s
writing career. Fed up with the disgust and disillusionment of the overt
materialism in modern Western world, he tries to find solution in eastern
mysticism. His other works include After Many a Summer (1939) and
Time Must Have a Stop (1944).
Brave New World
 It
was a fable about a future society. Since it described the horrible world of
future, the novel is always compared with George Orwell’s 1984. In Brave
New World Huxley presents before us a startling view of future, which on
the surface appears almost comical. The book begins with the emphasis on
mechanization in the modern Western world. There are some preposterous
suggestions such as human race being mass-produced and mass-civilized in
order to control easily. However, in the New Mexican Reservation, those new
human beings find the Indians who still live in a savage style. Then the
following part contributes to an Indian woman, Linda and her son, John. At
the end of the book, the Indian committed suicide for the intolerable modern
life. The novel provides us with a terrifying future in which people live
like mindless robots in a society governed by
totalitarianism. The
controllers use brainwashing to prevent the potential resentment and
rebellion of the oppressed. Through the eyes and mouth of the savage, Huxley
raises the question as whether the modern mechanized world is the better one
for human beings. The author is apparently inclined to the old free and
human world. The following paragraphs are from the opening of the novel in
which the ideal of the new world is put forward:
“A SQUAT grey building
of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL
LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's
motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the
north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat
of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily
seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh,
but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a
laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers
were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-colored rubber. The light
was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes
did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished
tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the
work tables.”
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